ABOUT THE ARTIST
"...Woodward's works are mysterious and formally alluring. This feeling is heightened by an overwhelming sense of the organic in her mechanical inventions."
ART PRACTICE: Laura Woodward lives and works on Dja Dja Wurrung Country near Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia. She has been creating sculptural kinetic installations and public artworks for several years, with her kinetic installations having been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia, alongside a growing public art practice. Laura's current studio explorations focus on the potential of system-based kinetic installations, where the system's inherent logic drives its formal and systematic emergence. Laura is interested in why our bodies respond to movement, and how movement in artwork can expand possibilities for audience engagement and accessibility. Over the past few years this focus has expanded somewhat, as she has started to explore the systems of human experience through her work. Recent projects have considered, somewhat obliquely, areas such as parenthood, life-giving, relationships, and death. These considerations have manifested in kinetic sculptures, installations, animations, drawings and photographic works.
Solo exhibitions include: “Attend”, HAIR, Melbourne, 2025; “This Fearsome Drop”, Stockroom, Kyneton, 2024; “The Unfixed”, Kings Artist Run, Melbourne, 2019; “Writhe”, Ararat Regional Gallery, 2015; “Introverted”, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Southbank, 2013; “The Saltus”, Place Gallery, Richmond, 2011; and “Underwing”, Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, St Kilda, 2010.
Permanent public artworks include “Wildflowers”, commissioned to celebrate the story of the women founders of Castlemaine Art Museum, installed in Castlemaine Botanical Gardens, 2026; “Conical” for United Places boutique hotel, Yarraville, 2018; “Murmur”, in collaboration with Jem Freeman, installed in Marina Tower, Docklands, 2017; “Encircle”, for Elwood Primary School, 2017; “Voices”, in collaboration with Jem Freeman, installed in Craigieburn Shopping Centre, 2013; and the Horsham Highway Entrance Sculpture, 2012.
Curated group exhibitions include “Floating Land: Escape Making”, a biannual site-responsive art festival in Noosa surrounds, 2025; “Experimenta: Life Forms” which toured Australia from 2021 to 2023; “Systematic” which toured Australia from 2018 to 2022; “Composing Common Worlds”, curated by Dr Kent Wilson, Hawthorn Town Hall Gallery and “In Motion”, curated by Sally Clarke, Airspace, Sydney, 2014; and the “McClelland Sculpture Award”, 2007 and 2010.
RECOGNITION: Laura received a Creative Victoria Creator’s Fund Grant in 2022 and won the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture Rural and Regional Development Award in 2020. She received an Australia Council Emerging Artist New Work Grant in 2010 and Australia Council Mid-Career Artist New Work Grants in 2013 and 2014; received a 'Highly Commended' award for the Art Gallery of NSW Studios in Paris Scholarship; was the winner of the Agendo Prize for Emerging Artists in 2009; and received both the Vulcan Steel Postgraduate Tutorship Award and a Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship Award in 2007. She has also been short-listed for numerous awards and commissions.
BEYOND THE STUDIO: Laura is a lecturer in the School of Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, where she won the Faculty Teaching Award (early career) in 2016 for the pedagogical-research project "Calling Percy" and was also awarded an ACUADS Early Career Award for the same project. She has previously taught in the Sculpture Department at RMIT University, in the Sculpture Department at Hong Kong Art School (with RMIT), and in the Sculpture & Spatial Practice Department at the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne.
Laura owned and managed Ironside Studios from 2009 to 2024, when it closed due to building redevelopment, and co-owns the design and fabrication business Like Butter.
Untitled (Ripples), 2011
I acknowledge and extend my appreciation to the Dja Dja Wurrung People, the Traditional Owners of the land on which I work and live. The Dja Dja Wurrung people have been creating art, sharing stories, and looking after country on these lands for millenia, and I pay my respects to their leaders and Elders past, present and emerging.